Fortunately, Warning About Global “Nihilistic Chaos” Isn’t Alarmist

John Podhoretz wants conservatives to take Obama seriously, which he thinks means making a different set of absurd arguments:

The notion that Obama is a dangerous extremist helps him, because it makes him seem reasonable and his critics foolish. It also helps those who peddle it, because it makes them notorious and helps them sell their wares. But it has done perhaps irreparable harm to the central conservative cause of the present moment—making the case that Obama’s social-democratic statism is setting the United States on a course for disaster and that his anti-exceptionalist foreign policy is setting the world on a course for nihilistic chaos [bold mine-DL]. Those are serious arguments, befitting a serious antagonist. They may not sell gold coins as quickly and as well as excessive alarmism, but they have the inestimable advantage of being true.

Of course, warning about global “nihilistic chaos” being unleashed by an “anti-exceptionalist foreign policy” is just another example of excessive alarmism that produces the same effects as the attacks Podhoretz wants conservatives to reject. No one outside the bubble of movement conservatives and hard-liners believes that Obama’s foreign policy is “anti-exceptionalist” in any sense, much less in the tendentious way that it is being applied here. This is a misleading and incredibly stupid claim that hawkish critics of Obama have been making for four years. It isn’t true, it certainly isn’t serious, and it undermines the credibility of these hawkish critics.

These critics have had a bad habit of just making up a fantasy foreign policy record to attack instead of criticizing the one that exists. This wasn’t just Romney’s mistake, but one that many on the right have been making since before Obama was elected the first time. When Obama has erred in his decisions, it has had nothing to do with his supposed lack of confidence in American exceptionalism, and it has usually been the result of deferring to conventional wisdom on national security issues. Hawks can’t effectively criticize these errors, because most of Obama’s errors in office have come from carrying out some version of their preferred policies. The anti-Hagel panic was the culmination of four or five years’ worth of pretending that Obama’s foreign policy views were something radically different from what they are. Suffice it to say, a movement that happily recycled the most absurd attacks against Hagel has lost the ability to distinguish between serious and spurious arguments. The fact that Podhoretz’s call for “serious arguments” against Obama relies on one of the most ridiculous anti-Obama attacks of all just confirms it.

Podhoretz and other pseudo-neo con hawks have perpetuated this myth or “noble lie” that Obama is acting in direct contradistinction of their bellicose views. This is preposterous, but Obama’s preferred methods of intervention are different than the all out recklessness and aggression of the neocons and other true believers in the cult of American exceptionalism.

Obama may not wave incense in front of the altar of exceptionalism, but he does mouth phrases such as “indispensable nation” or separate his views from that of “isolationists”.

This is really the difference between Clinton and Bush in style and rhetoric, not basic presuppositions concerning military intervention and expanding the empire.

“his anti-exceptionalist foreign policy is setting the world on a course for nihilistic chaos”

One thing about this statement that’s very smart: Podhoretz accuses Obama of “anti-exceptionalism.”

(We should take a moment to let that sink in: Being accused of “anti-exceptionalism” is now something we need to worry about. Another nail in the coffin of the idea of “progress.”)

OK, so how is that smart? Because it’s irrefutable. You can quote Obama all you want, and they’ll just say, “He doesn’t mean it,” or, “He’s not exceptionalist enough!”

Imagine if he had accused Obama of being “anti-interventionist”?

Easily refuted. By every measure, Obama’s more interventionist than the former Supreme Allied Commander was when he became president, Dwight Eisenhower. By number of interventions and escalation of troops committed to combat, he’s more interventionist than Nixon, Ford, and Carter put together. He’s more interventionist than Reagan in terms of US troops committed to combat.

Rather, he fits in nicely with the very interventionist presidents of the last quarter century–Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II.

All four of them have this in common, too: They’ve been president in a post-Cold War global environment.

Perhaps that fact is more important than the philosophy or temperament of any given president?

When are the stakes anything other than the difference between peace, order, prosperity and global chaos? It’s a wonder we don’t tumble into the pit of chaos every other week, seeing as we are constantly on the precipice.

To you and me, sure. But to his target audience, of the fearful rank-and-file, and the marketers who need to appeal to them? It doesn’t undermine his credibility one bit.

Fearful, groundless exaggeration is essential for Republican politicians and op-ed writers. Podhoretz would be making a terrible career move to do anything else. The accuracy and seriousness of his arguments are quite irrelevant.